I taught third graders about John Audubon. Not that he was an enslaver and a white supremacist. But I should have.

For thirty years I was an elementary Art teacher.

I am proud of my years teaching young students about art, making art, making informed judgements about their own art and the art of others and the value of the art of every human culture.

Nearly 11 years into retirement I still reflect on the work I did and how successful or unsuccessful I was. I still have that teacher gene, so I can’t help myself.

It pains me to see the rise of book banning and the attempt to rewrite history in order to exclude so much of our story, particularly the bad stuff.

I shake my head reading about Florida and Texas teachers hiding their books from government investigators searching for critical race theory.

Its Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 come to life.

Ignorance is not bliss.

As their Art teacher, for third graders I created a curriculum that focused on birds.

My experience had taught me that through repetition my students would gain confidence and skill by creating and recreating an image of the same bird.

So we drew birds. We painted birds. We made bird masks. We embroidered birds.

I began by randomly giving a postcard of a north American bird painted by John Audubon to each student. It would be their bird for the entire year.

I shared what I knew about Audubon. That he was Haitian born. That he was one of the first American naturalists.

But what I didn’t share was what I didn’t know.

That Audubon was a racist and pro-slavery.

So my own ignorance was passed on to my students.

Do third graders drawing birds need to know that the artist they are looking at was also a slave-owner and a white supremacist?

Of course!

Curriculum is all about answering the question that my mentor and professor Dr. William Schubert would pose: What is important for our students to know and experience.

Knowing that slavery and its legacy is invested into every part of American life is one answer to that question, just as Governor Ron DeSantis’ “anti-woke” agenda is a different reactionary answer to it.

Recently the local Chicago Chapter of the John Audubon Society announced it plans to change its name.

The national organization is also engaged in confronting the history of its namesake.

I think back thirty years about how I would have taught birds differently had I not been so ignorant myself.

I’m still a teacher.

I just can’t let it go.